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Posted: 4/8/2006 10:42:54 AM
With the news this week saying that Apple is now supporting the option of running Windows XP on Mac Intel platforms, a lot of people got excited about buying the new mac platform. Since a healthy dose of that came from the users I support at work, I was asked to evaluate the useability of the new combination. What follows are my impressions of running XP Professional on a Macbook Pro. While much of the news that's out there focuses on how easy it is to setup, information about where it falls short of expectations is severely lacking.
The installation really was as smooth as everyone has reported. I only encountered two issues that hopefully Apple will fix in the near future. First, I partitioned the drive expecting to use half of the available space for OSX and half for Windows. Then I installed OSX, performed updates, and installed Boot Camp. When I went into the Boot Camp wizard, I discovered that the utility wouldn't let me use the free space I had reserved on the drive for Windows. I could only sub-divide the current system volume into smaller chunks. So, the partitioning of the drive turned out to be very inflexible. I had to re-install OSX and tell the installer to use the entire drive to get the results I initially wanted.
The second installation quirk I ran into was with the selection of which partition was going to get Windows XP. The XP installer showed three volumes and a tiny bit of free space on the drive. From what I've read since, the Boot Camp manual shows which partition to choose, but being the computer guy I am, I didn't bother to read the manual. "We don't need no stinking manuals!" I guessed and chose the one that was labeled 'C:\'. Luckily, I was right. A wrong step here could end up with the user re-installing OSX from scratch. Beyond these problems, the installation was very smooth, slow, and as boring as most XP installations tend to be.
After installation, I installed the drivers that come included with Boot Camp, configured the wireless network, and updated everything through Windows Update. Immediately following that, I ran into an interesting problem. I could use IE to go to sites like www.msn.com, www.lifehacker.com, www.consumerist.com, and www.gizmodo.com, but I could not connect with most any of the websites within our organization, www.keh.com, or slashdot.org. The browser would initially connect with the webserver and follow any redirects that occurred but then it would hang up indefinately and refuse to render the page. After yet another reboot and an installation of Mozilla Firefox, it worked as expected and I never ran into the problem again. I'm chalking this one up to either a bug in the drivers or some necessary intimidation in the form of installing a competing browser. Either way, I think this issue will eventually recur and could pose an intermittent problem for end users.
On the subject of drivers, I can honestly say that they are very incomplete. Battery management in Windows XP on the MacBook Pro is virtually non-existant. Letting the laptop sit idle doesn't power down the display or suspend the hard drive. Obviously, these things can be configured through Windows XP's native screen saver and power management utilities, but that is in contrast to the utilities typically installed on Intel XP laptops which offer a great deal more flexibility. As a result, I would expect battery life under XP to be degraded.
The other driver problems are more minor. The display is constantly set to maximum brightness for instance. You can lower the brightness, but if the laptop is put into sleep mode the display will return to the maximum setting. I even had one instance where it appeared to change to the maximum setting on it's own. Also, sound comes out of the laptop's speakers regardless of whether or not headphones are plugged in, and the sound control panel had to be explicitly told when headphones were plugged in or it would complain that there was a problem with the port. Finally, the keyboard and mouse do present some challenges. So far, I haven't yet figured out how to hit ctrl-alt-del on the laptop keyboard, so locking and unlocking my session is still a mystery. The lack of a second button on the mouse or a way to generate a right-click has hindered some of the more common shortcuts I typically use in Windows. These are minor issues and I'm sure that with a bit more polish, the drivers would be up to the standards we normally expect from Apple.
Beyond these problems, everything else has been great. The laptop knows enough to go to sleep when the lid is closed and every program I've tested has worked as expected. The USB connectivity appears to be fully functional. Beyond that, I've gotten rather spoiled with the widescreen display on the mac since it allows me to have more applications shown side by side on the display.
Next week, I will be evaluating Parallels Workstation which allows users to run Windows XP programs and Mac OSX programs at the same time. Overall, I would have to say Parallels Workstation would be a better solution since it would save users from having to reboot to switch from one operating system to the other. I'm a little skeptical of how well the software will work due to my previous experiences with Virtual PC on the mac platform. If that evaluation goes well, you may be seeing another entry here detailing my experiences.
Posted: 3/23/2006 7:31:52 AM
Over the past few weeks, I've been working on creating a utility to help system admins and end users audit the permissions on Windows file servers. dumpDirSec is a c# .Net application that will generate a report containing a listing of end users that are granted a particular level of access. Group names are contained in the report, but the main feature is that you will no longer have to check group after group to actually see who the end users of a particular file share are.
The current version is 1.0 and it does have some limitations that primarily result from tailoring the software to my particular work environment. I've put the project under the GPL, so hopefully others will contribute to making the program work in a wider array of environments. Otherwise, I'd consider this beta quality software - it probably won't crash, but it lacks some polish here and there. Follow the link below for more details:
Read more...
Posted: 1/2/2006 4:30:55 PM
First off, Happy New Year.
Over the holiday weekend, I had some time to experiment with putting together a cheap macro lens for my DSLR. It all started when I saw an article on someone's blog where they used a pringles can to get macro capabilities. I took that and expanded on it, trying to solve some of the problems that were cited in the other article. My solution is both better and worse. Better because it excludes more of the probability of getting dust into the camera, and worse because I would need to buy an extension tube set to vary the amount of magnification.
Finally, I've got some spammer out there that has the misguided notion that I want my site to be at the top of the google listings or some-such. If you're that spammer and your reading this: I don't care what your selling, but I'm sure those who are interested will find the site on their own without your help. Find some other sucker. Sorry to subject everyone to that message, but I just can't seem to get the point across any other way.
Read more...
Posted: 11/30/2005 11:32:55 AM
Every once in a while, I get asked the following question: "I just got an email that says I tried to send an email message to someone I've never heard of and it bounced back. Why?" Or it goes something like this: "I got a message that says I tried to send a virus to someone and the email was rejected. How is that possible?" Well, the answer is a little technical, but I'm going to show you how this happened. Read more...
Posted: 8/27/2005 10:35:43 AM
pbase.com's latest magazine contains an article citing incongruities as a core idea in creating interesting photos. The article takes the reader through a series of photos by the author explaining how the various elements are intrinsically at odds with their environment or other objects in the scene. The one thing I disagree with in the article is the idea that the author had meticulously analyzed each and every element before tripping the shutter. I think in many instances, we take photos because we find something about the scene to be interesting to us, but we may not know at the time exactly why we find it interesting. In those instances, we just take the photo and worry about explaining the results afterwards.
Take for example, the above photo. This is a single Bee Balm plant that has been laying on my back step for a couple of months. By pure chance, myself and everyone who has visited my home has managed to step over this particular plant even though it's right in the path of daily foot traffic. One morning as I was leaving for work, I wondered why everyone, sub-consciously or otherwise, had avoided destroying it. That evening, I took the above photo. The neighbors probably thought I was nuts, anyway.
As I was editing this, I was thinking about the pbase article and it occurred to me that I can easily pick out those elements at odds with their surroundings. There's the dead, and decaying wood of the background in contrast to the life of the plant in the foreground. Certainly they are the kinds of things the author talked about, but they are also not the reasons I took the photo. The realization here is that it's easy to go back through older photos and say in art-speak, "This photo is interesting because element A is contrasted in relation to element B", when the reality is the photo was taken for different reasons.
In the end I came to the conclusion that I should just continue to photograph what I find interesting and leave the incongruities to the art critics. The time spent figuring out such things should probably be used for creating more images.
As a side note, I would add that I do appreciate the time it takes pbase.com's members to create a quality publication which adds a lot to the quality of the online community. I don't mean the above to dismiss the quality or value of the publication - my intent is only to offer a contrasting view to a single article. I would certainly encourage anyone reading this to download and read the latest issue.